Celebrating A Decade of Innovation: A Short History of HoopJumper and the WWWThis month HoopJumper celebrates its 10th anniversary. That’s right, we opened in 2005. Can anyone even remember that far back? In 2005 the Internet was still the Wild West, a very different landscape from today. Its potential was just starting to unfold.

Then HoopJumper burst onto the scene with a new concept: use the Internet to help real estate agents and clients jump through the hoops of buying and selling a house with the greatest of ease. Coming in 2005, it was a stroke of genius. Why not use the Internet to put real estate agents and clients in touch with each other in truly meaningful ways? Agents could blog about their properties on a regular basis, and clients could see an ever-unfolding spectrum of properties. Customers would be charmed and engaged, and agents would be interactive and available.

Today this might seem obvious, but back in 2005, it was a revolution.

Back then nobody knew what the Internet would eventually be able to do. Facebook hadn’t yet been unleashed on the world, and LinkedIn was only two years old. The most popular site at that time was the dinosaur MySpace, now extinct. The iPhone– with its dazzling ecosystem of mobile apps– was still a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye. And when HoopJumper first opened its doors on February 2, nobody had even heard of YouTube! Of course, they followed quickly in our footsteps, going live just two weeks after us, on February 15.

We’re proud that from the very beginning we’ve been at the forefront of innovation– envisioning new ways to make the Internet work for realtors in amazing ways.

Since we began, there have been so many changes in the way things are done. Let’s take a quick flyover to see how the world has changed.

In 2005, no one had heard of Zillow– it didn’t exist. Real estate agent websites were for the most part just glorified online brochures with the realtor’s smiling face, a biography, and contact info. And WordPress was only two years old. Not yet the dominant website creation platform it is today, it was still competing with other platforms, just like Betamax used to compete with VHS. But this was soon to change.

Then HoopJumper opened its doors. HoopJumper pioneered the use of internal blogging for real estate, and our clients who engaged with our best practices had amazing success right out of the box.

 

In 2007, when a recession hit the real estate world, we stood by our clients through those tumultuous years, actively innovating and working to integrate our systems with the new world of social media. We served as reliable guides for our clients, keeping them current with the rapid advances in technology, and showing them how to upgrade their Internet presence regularly so as not to become stale and obsolete.

We took a huge leap forward in 2011 when we moved lock, stock and barrel into creating our winning website system with its unique WordPress platform. This important change enabled real estate agents with a passion for innovation to add massive amounts of crucial content to their own websites quickly and easily, without needing to hire an expensive webmaster to create individual pages at a high cost.

Our WordPress platform has since become the #1 preferred website platform for real estate agents nationwide because of its power and flexibility.

In 2013 we saw the seachange to mobile coming. We realized in advance that there would be a “tipping point” where more real estate consumers would be accessing the Internet on their mobile devices than on traditional computers. We immediately pivoted to creating what is now our unique pride and glory: 100% responsive websites that work optimally on any device– whether mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop.

Today, in 2015, we continue to set innovation standards by combining the very best of social, local and mobile to create the HoopJumper Advantage, a full service 24/7 Internet marketing system that not only brands you as an innovative real estate professional who stands out from the generic masses, but also gives consumers a one-stop information center for all their real estate wishes and dreams.

It’s been a long and exciting ten-year journey, and we’re thrilled to celebrate it with you today. Moving forward, we can’t even imagine what wonderful developments are on the horizon. All we know is that we’re in it for the long haul– constantly innovating, constantly thinking hard about how we can make the Internet work better for the the dedicated and hard-working real estate professionals it’s our pleasure to serve.